Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101213/18555012260/dailydirt-mysteries-universe----shooting-stuff.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101213/18555012260/dailydirt-mysteries-universe----shooting-stuff.shtml

Dark Matter and antimatter might be explained by the existence of a unique kind of particle called the X particle. Or maybe the two phenomena are totally unrelated -- but we'll need some really big detectors to find out. [url]

Some physicists are worried about inflation (not the economic kind). Who needs the Big Bang and some wild story of the universe expanding at a crazy rate for an insanely brief period of time? But is it more plausible that particles lose mass with age? [url]

The Large Hadron Collider hasn't found the microscopic black holes it was looking for -- ruling out a variety of theories of how the universe might contain extra hidden dimensions. The universe still might have those extra dimensions, but we'll have to look a bit harder for them now. [url]

The Pioneer Anomaly has a recently-calculated explanation based on Newtonian laws and a detailed 3D model of the thermal properties of the Pioneer spacecraft. Looks like there's no need to introduce strange new forces at work in our solar system... [url]

Shooting stuff out of our solar system is cool -- but so is shooting stuff locally. The US Navy has a new railgun with a range of about 100 miles. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101213/18555012260 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:52:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091029/0151366712.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091029/0151366712.shtml change their music to deal with the fact that it wasn't licensed for DVD release originally (often because when the TV shows were on the air, there was no such thing as a DVR -- or even a VCR -- so it couldn't even have been predicted). Then, of course, there have been a series of famous lawsuits over whether or not publications can "republish" their old magazines in electronic format, because freelancers who wrote the original articles only signed licenses for the single publication.

However, it looks like lawyers drafting such legal arrangements are beginning to recognize this as an issue and are trying to prepare for such eventual new media opportunities. Eric Goldman alerts us to a WSJ article, highlighting how phrases like "in all media, throughout the universe" are becoming increasingly common in licensing contract language. While some decry this as being imprecise and overly broad, I tend to fall on the other side of the fence. Not having those types of clauses in agreements in decades past have resulted in a lot of long and drawn out lawsuits (and old content that simply cannot be repurposed for modern media). Better to have the language seem ridiculously inclusive than lose culture to history because no one predicted the next popular format.

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